The Cryotron Remembered

[Sean Haas] is a “dangerous freelance historian,” and his recent talk at the Vintage Computer Festival in Southern California covers the cryotron — a strange detour on the road to computers circa 1956. The NSA wanted a computer to break codes, but in 1956, there wasn’t much to pick from, especially since they wanted a very fast computer.

As you might expect from the name, a cryotron depends on superconductivity. The original device was a tantalum wire wrapped with a niobium wire coil. When the device is soaked in liquid helium, both wires become superconducting. The tantalum wire can carry way more current in that state unless the niobium coil generates a magnetic field, which kills the wire’s superconductivity. On the plus side, you have a relay-like switch that works with no moving parts. On the negative side, you need liquid helium.

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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Pickle Pi

Image by [jefmer] via Hackaday.IO
The unstoppable [jefmer] wrote in to alert me to Pickle Pi, their latest Keebin’-friendly creation. Why “Pickle Pi”? Well, the Pi part should be obvious, but the rest comes from the Gherkin 30% ortholinear keyboard [jefmer] built with Gateron Yellows and, unfortunately, second-choice XDA keycaps, as the first batch were stolen off of the porch.

If you’re wondering where the rest of the keys are, they are accessible by holding various keys rather than tapping them. Shift is Shift when tapped held, but becomes Enter when tapped. [jefmer] wrote out their entire project description on the thing in order to break in the Gherkin.

The brains of this acrylic sandwich tablet is a Pi Zero 2, with a Pro Micro for the keyboard controller. Although programs like Ghostwriter and Thonny work fine, Chromium is “painfully slow” due to the RAM limitations of the Pi Zero 2. On the upside, battery life is 7-8 hours depending on usage. Even so, [jefmer] might replace it with a Pi 4 — the current battery pack won’t support a Pi 5.
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Dodge, The Weird Tripod Robot

[hannu_hell] created Dodge as a “novel design of tripod.” It’s a small robotic device quite unlike anything else we’ve seen of late. It’s intended to be a self-mobile camera platform that can move itself around to capture footage as needed.

Dodge is essentially a two-legged robot with a large flat “foot” in the center. When stationary, it rests on this flat foot. When it needs to move, it can raise this center foot and rest on its two outside legs. If Dodge needs to move, it can crab back and forth in a line with these two legs. If it wants to turn, it can return to resting on its center foot, and pivot about its central axis. It can thus rotate itself and use its two outer legs to move further as needed.

Dodge does all this while carrying an ESP32 Cam module. The idea is that it’s a small mobile tripod platform with a live camera feed. It reminds us of various small monitoring robots from cartoons and anime.

Ultimately, it’s an interesting take on robot locomotion. Rather than walking with two legs or four legs and dynamic stability, it takes full advantage of static stability instead.

We’ve seen some wild roboticized camera rigs over the years. Video after the break.

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User Beware: The Fine Line Between Content And Code

Everyone loves themes. Doesn’t matter if it’s a text editor or a smart display in the kitchen, we want to be able to easily customize its look and feel to our liking. When setting up a new device or piece of software, playing around with the available themes may be one of the first things you do without giving it much thought. After all, it’s not like picking the wrong one is going to do something crazy like silently delete all the files on your computer, right?

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened a few days ago to [JeansenVaars] while trying out a Plasma Global Theme from the KDE Store. According to their Reddit post, shortly after installing the “Gray Layout” theme for the popular Linux graphical environment, the system started behaving oddly and then prompted for a root password. Realizing something didn’t seem right they declined, but at that point, it was already too late for all of the personal files in their home directory.

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A 65-in-1 The 2024 Way

If necessity is the mother of invention, nostalgia must be its stepmother, or its aunt at the very least. The desire to recreate long-obsolete devices simply because they existed while we were growing up is a curious trait, but one that’s powerful enough to drive entire categories of hardware hacking — looking at you, retrocomputing buffs.

Hardware nostalgia isn’t all about 6502s and Z80s, though. Even more basic were the electronic toys of the 1970s, such as the Radio Shack 65-in-1 kit that [Tom Thoen] is currently recreating. The 65-in-1 was a breadboarding kit aimed at the budding electrical engineer, with components mounted to colorful cardboard by spring terminals. The included “lab manual” had circuits that could be quickly assembled using a handful of jumper wires. It was an endlessly fascinating toy that undoubtedly launched many careers, present company included.

The original 65-in-1 was $21.95 in 1976, or about $120 today.

While the passage of time may not have dulled [Tom]’s memories of his original 65-in-1, technology has marched on, meaning that certain allowances had to be made to create a modern version. He wisely eschews the cardboard for PCBs, one for each of the major component blocks provided in the original, and uses female header connectors in place of the springs. Component choice is tailored for the times; gone are the ferrite rod antenna and variable capacitor of the original, as well as the incandescent lamp, which is replaced by an LED that would have been a significant fraction of the kit’s $21.95 price back in 1976. There’s no BOM yet, so we can’t say for sure if any of the transistors are germanium, but it’s clear that there aren’t any of the old TO-1 cans. But dismay not, originalists, for the meter, relay, CdS photocell, and “solar battery” all made the final cut.

[Tom] has done some beautiful work here, with more to come. We imagine that 3D printing could be used to recreate some details like the original Morse key and speaker grille. We love the laser-engraved backing board, too, as it captures some of the charm of the original’s wooden box. This isn’t the only love for the “Science Fair” brand we’ve seen lately, either; the nostalgia seems to be contagious.

Retro Hackintosh Made From Retro Parts

Apple as a company, has staked most of its future around being a “walled garden” where it controls everything from the hardware up through the user experience. In some ways this is good for users; the hardware is generally high quality and vetted by the company creating the software, making for a very uniform experience. This won’t stop some people from trying to get Apple’s operating systems and other software running on unapproved hardware though. These “Hackintosh” computers were much more common in the Intel era but this replica goes even further back to the Macintosh era.

Originally [Kevin] had ordered an authentic Macintosh with the intent of getting it working again, but a broken floppy disk drive and lack of replacement parts turned this project into a different beast. He used the Mac instead as a model for a new 3D-printed case, spending a ton of time sanding, filling, and finishing it to get it to look nearly indistinguishable from the original. The hardware going in this replica is an old Linux-based thin client machine running the Mini vMac operating system, with a modified floppy drive the computer uses to boot. A hidden SD card slot helps interface with modern computers. The display is a modern LCD, though a sheet of acrylic glued to the front panel replicates a bit of the CRT curve.

Click through to read on!

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Retrotechtacular: Right To Repair 1987

In 1987, your portable Osborne computer had a problem. Who you gonna call? Well, maybe the company that made “The Osborne Survival Kit,” a video from Witt Services acquired by the Computer History Museum. The narrator, [Mark Witt], tells us that they’ve been fixing these computers for more than three years, and they want to help you fix it yourself. Those days seem long gone, don’t they?

Of course, one thing you need to know is how to clean your floppy drives. The procedure is easy; even a 10-year-old can do it. At least, we think [William Witt] is about 10 in the video. He did a fine job, and we wonder what he’s up to these days.

The next step was taking the machine apart, but that required adult supervision. In some cases, it also took a soldering iron. As a byproduct, the video inadvertently is a nice tear-down video, too.

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